Friday, August 14, 2015

Must TV cameras intrude on private grief?

(First published in the Nelson Mail and Manawatu Standard, August 12.)

When I joined the now-defunct
New Zealand Journalists’ Association in 1968 (union membership in those days
being compulsory), I automatically signed up to the journalists’ code of
ethics.

One of the rules in that code
was that journalists should accept no compulsion to intrude on private grief.
In other words if my boss asked me to seek an interview with a family that had
just lost someone in a car accident, I was entitled to say no, and the union
would back me.

The rule was generally
respected, although ambitious young journalists often accepted such assignments
nonetheless, knowing they were a source of good human-interest stories. I did
such “death-knocks”, as they were known, once or twice myself.

It was well-known that
bereaved people would often open up willingly to a reporter who turned up on
the doorstep. It was a chance to pay tribute to the person who had died and it seemed
to have a cathartic effect, as if it was the first step in the process of
grieving and confronting their loss.

The resulting stories were usually
handled sensitively. Complaints from families alleging that they had been
exploited or manipulated were rare.

Despite knowing all this, I
squirmed last week when One News
showed footage of the three Nepalese sisters who lost their parents and younger
brother in a fire in Waimate.

TV3 News, which I gave up
watching months ago after it gratuitously broadcast video of an ugly assault involving teenage girls in Northland, apparently screened similar footage.

The three sisters appeared to
be comforting each other in bed. The camera moved in very close and lingered
for an inexcusably long time on the weeping siblings.

The oldest sister tried to
speak but mumbled only a few words before breaking down. I shouted at the TV
set to leave them alone. My wife felt the same way but sensibly refrained from
shouting, realising it probably wouldn’t have much effect.

I often feel uncomfortable
watching people sharing their most intimate thoughts and experiences with
television interviewers. I want to say “Stop! You shouldn’t be revealing these
things to an audience of strangers.”

But I have to accept that
they appear to be speaking voluntarily and in full knowledge of what they’re
doing, even if the reasons escape me. When it comes to intrusions into privacy,
there’s no bright, clear line separating what’s ethical or acceptable from
what’s clearly beyond the pale.

Even the fuzziest line,
though, was crossed in the coverage of the grieving sisters from Waimate. The
camera made us all voyeurs in a moment of intense grief – and for what
purpose?

Did it tell us anything about
the tragedy that we weren’t able to deduce for ourselves? Or was it just a
cheap attempt to wallow in the emotion of the moment, as television loves to
do?

Not only would the sisters
have been emotionally vulnerable, but they were still relatively recent
immigrants from a culture not accustomed to the Western media’s way of doing
things.

That makes matters worse.
They wouldn’t have had PR advisers on hand to advise them how to deal with the
media.

That they agreed to the
interview is no justification for its screening, as was apparently argued by someone from TV3 on Twitter. The sisters may have thought
this was just how things are done in New Zealand. You suffer a tragic event and
you let the TV cameras in to record your sorrow.

What a shame no one told them
they didn’t have to do this; that they were entitled to mourn in private.

I’ve heard it suggested that
the sisters were persuaded not only to give the interview, but to make their
grief obvious because it would encourage people to donate to a fund set up for
them. But that’s a darkly cynical spin to put on events. I prefer to
think they assumed this was what’s expected of bereaved people in New Zealand.

Either way, TV news editors
should have had the discretion not to broadcast the footage, or
at least to keep it to a few seconds. But no, the sight of distraught people
struggling to come to terms with a personal tragedy was just too good to
resist.

It caused me to wonder, yet
again, why I bother to turn on the 6pm news when so much of it makes me cringe.
The answer, I suppose, is that we human beings are social animals who need to
know what’s happening in the world, even if we have to see it through the
distorting filters of the news bulletin.

One good thing came out of
this. On talkback radio that night there was an outpouring of disgust over the
item. Many callers said they had switched off. “Vultures” was one of the more
pithy epithets used.

Similar sentiments were
expressed on a New Zealand journalists’ Facebook page. When even some of the TV
journalists’ peers found the footage repugnant, and said so, perhaps there’s
some hope for us after all.

About Me

I am a freelance journalist and columnist living in the Wairarapa region of New Zealand. In the presence of Greenies I like to boast that I walk to work each day - I've paced it out and it's about 15 metres. I write about all sorts of stuff: politics, the media, music, wine, films, cycling and anything else that piques my interest - even sport, though I admit I don't have the intuitive understanding of sport that most New Zealand males absorb as if by osmosis. I'm a former musician (bass and guitar) with a lifelong love of music that led me to write my book 'A Road Tour of American Song Titles: From Mendocino to Memphis', published by Bateman NZ in July 2016. I've been in journalism for more than 40 years and like many journalists I know a little bit about a lot of things and probably not enough about anything. I have never won any journalism awards.